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The people downstairs don’t like me very much.
They think I’m strange.
They sit around the dinner table sometimes
And talk about how they don’t understand me.
The people downstairs are very different from me
But very similar to each other.
They all punch with their right hand.
They al...

All I want to do is watch the Olympics. I want to see the opening ceremonies, start to finish, (I might duck out to get pizza during the Parade of Nations, but the rest of it I want to see.) I want to watch my country take home bronze, silver, and even gold. I want to share the joy when someone some...

Essay 2 prompt -
Please tell us what academic class has been your favorite and why
At first, I loved chemistry because it felt like magic: extraordinary and inexplicable. After a while, I began to love chemistry because it did not feel like magic at all: no longer inexplicable, only extraor...

Common Application Personal Essay
Prompt – Topic of your choice
If a molecule is soluble only if it is more attracted to water than to itself, then what about Narcissus? Forty minutes into chemistry class and all I could think about was the immortalized character from Greek mythology ...

Essay 1 prompt: Other than fashion, what medium do you use for self-expression and why?
It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but my means of self-expression is becoming someone else. As an actor, my ultimate goal is to engulf my audience in a story by adopting an identity outside myself, and a...

University of Chicago extended essay, application for the 2012-2013 school year
Prompt - "Don't write about reverse psychology."
Don’t you dare read this essay. Don’t dangle on every word, do not devote your full attention to it because it is not worth it. So why are you ...

It’s the shadowy order I notice first,
The oppressiveness of the experience,
The illusion on the cards before me.
And suddenly I am ashamed.
Deep in the substratum of my brain,
It bites subtly, the paradox,
The vague sensation of culpability,
The sin.
I’m secretly snatching my identity f...

(A man, late twenties, is sitting at a small, wooden kitchen table with no tablecloth. Opposite him is a woman, maybe a few years older with black hair almost to her waist. She wears a casual, floor-length dress and is sitting on the edge of her seat, clearly uncomfortable. He is wearing simple khak...

She was eight the first time she ran away from home. With stale tears in her muddy eyes, she dumped the contents of her plastic piggy bank into the center of an old, red bandanna and then spent fifteen minutes trying to tie the small bundle to the tip of her mother’s yardstick. She snuck downstair...

I carefully placed the frosted glass of beer back in front of his plate before wiping the cold condensation from by hand onto the front of my jeans. “It tastes like pee.” I said, wrinkling my nose.
“How would you know? You tasted pee? Gross.”
I kicked him in the shin under the table,
...

It wasn’t a huge, burning flame of love to begin with, which is probably why it died so quietly: just a quiet ember that faded from orange to black so silently that hardly anyone noticed the change in the light. She was an outcast in the sense that she hardly mattered to the student body enough to...

Inspiration:
When she was nineteen, she spent an hour and eight minutes looking at a blank piece of paper. During that time, her phone rang twice. If she hadn't looked up in the following two minutes, her roommate would have spent thirty-four seconds building up the courage to tap her shoulder.
...

Today, I drove past the house,
And tried to see you through the window.
I had already memorized you,
(Hands wrapped around your tired blue blankie, soft snore,)
But still I wanted to see you from the street as I drove away....

To make-believe
And mystery,
To places only we can see.
Where invisible ink and magic doors,
Hide dusty walls and squeaking floors,
When symbols, codes, and treasure maps,
Lead pirates to sweet ginger snaps.
When birthday cake and storybooks,
Are tucked away in secret nooks.
Caught under-th...

This mountain has captured me.
Eternity is etched in these iron chains,
Winding deep though grey stone, equal in age.
There is no escape from this.
He comes every morning, steady and sure as the sun,
But brings with him no warmth, no light
Only pain.
My nights are countless minutes, s...

At five, a red-checkered table cloth.
Six was bright color and letters in books.
Eight was times tables and dinosaurs.
By nine I could feel, and by eleven, I’d found the words
to say so.
Twelve and I put my life on paper,
Thirteen and I’d ripped
it all to shreds.
Fifteen was a boy and l...

Have you ever seen “A Charlie Brown Christmas”? Come on … I'm a Jew and I've seen it. If so, you're probably familiar with this scene. Charlie Brown (who is inexplicably inseparable from his last name) turns to his thumb-sucking friend Linus (who inexplicably has no last name) after being humi...

I walk through the vast double doors, my hand sticking to the frosty handle. I scold myself for wearing flip-flops as my toes poke out into the cold air. The wet cuffs of my jeans stick to my ankles. I look around, glancing at the empty scoreboard and the flat ice. The Zamboni crawls across the rink...

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